Port Said, Port Fuad

On Friday I decided on a whim to travel to Port Said for the weekend to see what it was like. I took the bus for 23LE at 1:00pm from Turgoman Station in Cairo, arriving in Port Said around 4:00pm. Port Said (in Arabic pronounced bur sai-eed) is a city of a half million people, located at the junction of the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean Sea. After the construction of the modern canal in the 19th century, Port Said became one of the world's most significant ports. Although it's no longer as important as it once was, a large amount of intercontinental freighters and cruise liners pass through the harbor every week. For this reason, the whole city is a duty-free zone.

Along the road to Port Said.


I took a taxi from the bus station to the center of town. I had a lengthy and nearly fluid conversation in Arabic with the driver; it's always very gratifying to be able to talk for a long time in Arabic without any sort of awkward communication issues. I walked around for awhile before finding the hotel I had been searching for, the Mereland Hotel. I only stayed there because of the cheap price of 40 LE, or about $7 USD. It was pretty dirty and I wouldn't exactly recommend it as a place to stay.

Various shots from around Port Said.




View of the tiny alley from my hotel.



After walking around the city for awhile longer, I headed to the north of the city to check out the beach. The beach was disappointing. It was free, but therein lay the problem, as it was very dirty and uninviting. On the west side of the city was a popular restaurant called El Borg (The Tower). It was a nice sit-down place packed with Egyptians. I ordered shrimp soup and fried fish. They brought me the above, along with various side dishes and sauces. It was a real feast - I counted no less than twelve plates of various foods on my table at the same time. The food was delicious and I would highly recommend this restaurant.

Public beach.



El Borg Restaurant.


Strangely enough, there were at least a hundred balloon people lining the streets, promoting something.


I spend the rest of the evening wandering around the city. The city was bustling with shops of various types, especially electronics and clothes. The street that runs parallel to the canal, Sharia Palestine, consists almost entirely of cell phone shops, strangely enough. Most of the women here were dressed in conservative Islamic clothing, and a few of the men wore the galabeyya robe. However, it seemed as if most of the city-goers were wealthy or at least had a comfortable standard of living. Port Said serves as a popular tourist spot for Egyptians in the summer, but I went during the off season, so there weren't any to be seen. I did not see any Western tourists in the city either until the next day, when two big cruise liners docked into the harbor. I got the same question "are you from the ship?" numerous times that day from the locals.

Saturday I woke up early to try to find a place to enjoy breakfast, but I realized that none of the restaurants opened until after noon. I had to settle for coffee and cake at a hotel cafe. Afterward I walked to the west of the city to see the military museum, but the interior was closed for construction. I was able to see some of the exhibits on the museum lawn though, including equipment from the 1956 Suez Crisis and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. There was another museum of some sort in Port Said, but it too was closed.

Outside the military museum.



I had another enjoyable meal for lunch at a place called Abu Essam, not far from the beach. Nobody else was in the restaurant at the time, but it was a great place. They served a feast here too: seafood soup, shrimp kofta, and about a half dozen other plates of salads and sauces. About halfway through the meal I was served a bowl full of some ground leaves and oil to go with my meal. I was served the same thing the previous night at El Borg. This time I asked what it was, and my waiter told me it was "just for entertainment," whatever that was supposed to mean.

Various shots of the canal from Port Said.





Afterward I walked down to the ferry station a short distance along Sharia Palestine. Conveniently enough, the ferry is free, and it passes across the Suez Canal between Port Said and Port Fuad every five or ten minutes. Cars can cross via the ferry too. Port Fuad is a separate city which used to serve as a suburb for Europeans who worked at the port, and it still bears a certain resemblance to European architecture. Aside from some green residential areas and a good view of the canal, there wasn't anything to do in Port Fuad.

Shots of the canal from the ferry.



People getting off the ferry.


Port Fuad.


After I felt as if I had seen the whole downtown of the city several times, I took the bus back to Cairo at 7:00pm on Saturday. Overall, Port Said was a nice city, mostly clean with some good restaurants and shops. It was interesting to see the ships passing across the Mediterranean Sea and through the Canal. It wasn't stunningly impressive, but it does make for a good day trip out of Cairo.

They don't let you form your own opinions here...

al-Rehab

Thursday was a bit interesting as it was the first time I had hung out with Egyptian AUC students. Although the Egyptians students at AUC are polite, they really don't show any interest in befriending the international students. There is a certain amount of segregation between the Egyptian students and the international students at AUC. However the two Egyptian guys I met were interested to learn some of the things I was doing in the gym, and afterward one of them had a kickboxing class in al-Rehab so they invited me along.

We drove to Rehab, which was my first time in the neighborhood. It's a wealthy suburb very close to New Cairo. I had seen many vacancies in Rehab when I was apartment-searching, as it has a reputation as an up-and-coming area. Like New Cairo, the streets are wide and all the buildings are new construction. However everything was clean and relatively quiet, like Maadi. Everyone here was very wealthy by Egyptian standards. We went to the sporting club in Rehab. Sporting clubs in Egypt are the equivalent of country clubs in the US, where wealthy families go to learn and play sports in an exclusive environment. The sporting club was the size of a college campus, with manicured lawns and numerous sporting facilities, and even an on-campus mosque. Marwan took me to his kickboxing class, where the instructors were friendly and helpful.

Afterward, we went to a fateerah shop in Rehab, set up similar to the way a pizza shop is in the US. Fateerah is essentially deep-fried pastry with various toppings; in this case, various meats, vegetables, and cheeses. Marwan and Abbas were heavily influenced by Western culture, and wanted to know everything about life in the US, and wouldn't let me speak Arabic around them. Later we dropped Abbas off in Nasr City, which was also my first time there. Nasr is a suburb sandwiched by Islamic Cairo and Heliopolis. It's not as wealthy as Rehab, Maadi, or Heliopolis, but it was fairly clean and very busy. Nasr is the location of CityStars, which is a giant six-story mall which reputedly rivals some of its American counterparts. Marwan drove me home to Doqqi after.

Illness, and other updates

The week following my trip was particularly uneventful because I became sick and could not do much of anything. The Wednesday after returning from my trip, I began to feel sick at school, and that evening I realized I came down with some sort of food poisoning. It soon became apparent that it was not going away anytime soon. I went to see a doctor at Al-Salaam Hospital in Mohandeseen on Saturday. Since I am an AUC student, I was entitled to free healthcare and prescriptions there. I think I may have been given priority treatment too, since there were about a hundred people waiting in the lobby and I only had to wait about five minutes before seeing a doctor. Surprisingly it was an efficient and convenient trip to the hospital.

I spent the next several days in bed, essentially too weak to even leave my room. By the eighth day I was back to feeling some semblance of normality, and returned to school. Considering I am only studying abroad for a few months, a full week of being confined to doing nothing was unfortunate, but I am glad it happened after my spring break, and not during it.

I originally thought that something I ate or drank in Turkey gave me the food poisoning, but everything I had in Turkey was well-cooked and high-quality. I realized that it came from the fish on the EgyptAir flight from Istanbul to Cairo. I wasn't thinking at the time that this fish probably came from Cairo, and therefore from the Nile. The only thing I have ever avoided eating in Cairo was fish because I wouldn't want to eat anything that came from the Nile. (Alexandrian seafood is a different story.) Searching around on the Internet, it seems like at least a couple others have gotten food poisoning from EgyptAir food also.

The weather has gotten warmer, reaching 95 degrees on some days, but it is still bearable. The nights are cool and there is usually a comfortable breeze that carries over into the morning. There was a sandstorm the other day, and so when I returned to my apartment in the evening, everything was covered in a thin layer of dust.

Unfortunately the bug season has picked up. I've been leaving my windows open at night and so I wake up covered with mosquito bites. Flies are becoming more common, but they are merely an annoyance. We also have to deal with an ant issue in our apartment. Tiny ants are attacking all the food in the kitchen, which was never a problem until last week.

At AUC, May is the last month of the semester, and it seems that's also when the work begins to pile up. Most of the grades for classes are based on four exams, and two or three of them are in the last three weeks of school.

I have still a few things left I want to see before I return to the US. I am going to visit Siwa oasis in the Western Desert perhaps next weekend, and hopefully the monuments at Luxor the weekend after that. There are a few things left in Cairo that I am planning to see, notably the Pyramids. I will have a few days after final exams before my flight home for those.

Turkey: Kars, Istanbul, and back to Cairo

Spring Break Day Eleven (continued from part ten)

The last day of my trip, I didn't have any plans to travel to any other cities, since I had a flight out of Kars back to Istanbul at 2:45pm. After having breakfast at the hotel, I wandered around Kars again. I headed back to the citadel, but this time the castle was open.

Kars Kalesi, as it's known, was constructed in the 13th century as an Armenian fortress, and later used by the Ottomans. The view of the city from the castle is quite good.

Views from Kars Kalesi.





Just below the castle is the Armenian Church of the Holy Apostles, constructed in the 10th century, which has been converted to a mosque in the last ten years. I didn't go inside. There are also some hammams (Turkish bathhouses) nearby which are old, though I'm not exactly sure of their period.

Church of the Holy Apostles.



Ancient hammams.


Some bridge that has supposedly been here for hundreds of years.


After that, I wandered around the city some more, visiting a few shops and one of the many "baklava salons," which are like cafes, except they serve baklava and tea instead of coffee.

Kars did not have any of the conservative Islamic atmosphere that one might expect. While there were mosques, I did not notice the call to prayer, and most of the women were not veiled. Bars were as common as they are in the United States, in comparison to other places in the region where it is almost impossible to find a place that serves alcohol. Many of the bars were packed with men playing card games, and gambling on soccer scores was very popular.

Although most of the young adults and many of the women dressed in by Western standards, it seems any Kurdish man over 40 had a dress code. Every single male I saw over the age of 40 or so wore black shoes, slacks, a dress shirt, a colored sweater vest, a blazer, and a flat cap. I did not see any exceptions to this.

This picture clearly shows Soviet architectural influence in Kars.


Since Kars doesn't have an international airport, I had to return to Istanbul for a return flight back to Cairo. I took the shuttle from the Turkish Airlines office in Kars to the airport and arrived at the airport a little past noon. There was nowhere to get lost there - the airport only has one gate, so planes leave one at a time. The flight back to Istanbul was actually quite big, flying on a Boeing 737. I sat next to an elderly Kurdish man on the flight who couldn't sit still. On top of that he kept yelling at me about my iPod, as if he thought it was prohibited for me to use it on the flight or something.

I arrived Istanbul around 5:30pm, and after getting my luggage I proceeded to buy a ticket back to Cairo, only two hours before takeoff. I took the 8pm flight into Cairo with EgyptAir. The flight went smoothly. I was one of the few people who selected the fish option when asked about their in-flight meal choice. It turned out the last decision I made on my trip was the worst one, as I narrowed down this meal as the one that gave me a bad case of food poisoning for the eight days after that. I didn't notice it at the time, though. I arrived in Cairo around 10pm, welcomed by the madness of an Egyptian airport crowd. Getting my student visa stamped was not a problem, and after a long taxi ride back to Doqqi, my spring break was done.

Overall, a good trip with a lot of valuable experiences. The number of countries I've visited now numbers four, three of them being Middle Eastern countries.

Turkey: Kars, Ani

Spring Break Day Ten (continued from part nine)

The hotel served a good breakfast, though unusual by American standards: eggs, olives, bread, tea, honey, molasses, and some sort of sweet fudge-like squares.

Celil met us at 9am and drove us the 45km to Ani, the medieval capital of the Armenian Kingdom. When we arrived at Ani, we were given specific instructions: we were not to go on the citadel, near the bridge or the stream, or down into any valleys. I didn't ask what would happen, but I imagine arrest and deportation would be options. It doesn't make sense to me that Turkey controls the former Armenian capital, especially since it's situated right on the Armenian border, but raising political questions like that didn't seem like a good idea either.

Just outside the Ani site.





As you can tell from the pictures, the Ani site is spread out across a wide expanse. Most of the buildings that remained were churches from around the year 900 to 1100. There was also a palace, a fortress (prohibited), some houses, some shops, and a wine press located on the site.

The site takes a couple hours to walk around and fully appreciate. There were only a handful of tourists there, and the village around Ani only has a few people living in it. As a result, the whole site is quiet and peaceful.

Various pictures from the ruined city of Ani.










You can get very close to the Turkish-Armenian border at the site, close enough to throw a rock across the stream that separates the two countries. Some of the staff walked around to let people know which areas were off-limits. We noticed three soldiers who were making patrols, one carrying a teapot, no less.

The stream separating the two countries.



Soldiers passing by, one carrying a teapot.



After returning to Kars, I wandered around the city a bit, venturing up to the citadel and near some of the ancient hammams which reside in the city. I had dinner at a restaurant on Ataturk Cad, though I don't remember the name. The staff didn't know any English, but it was obvious they were excited to have a foreigner eat there. I couldn't understand anything on the menu, so I picked something at random, and it turned out to be a plate with meats prepared in various ways. The food was great, and they treated me like a VIP.

That night I wandered around the city a bit more, visiting a couple Internet cafes. Although only half the size of Van, there was something about Kars that made it more interesting. The only tourists I saw in the city were the ones I had already met, including a British guy who was on a motorcycle trip from Greece to India.

Ataturk Cad in Kars at night. I don't know the reason for the lights.


Outside my hotel in Kars.